Dad’s tips on how to choose a children’s thermometer

When I was a child I remember my mother taking my temperature when I was sick.  That thermometer was a skinny glass tube with mercury in it, but it seemed to work.  When Baby Mojo was born we were given a gift bag of various medical things including a digital thermometer.  That thing worked like a charm until my wife and I went to see the doctor.

During one of those first visits we walked away from the doctor thinking that the only effective way to take his temperature was rectally.  So being diligent parents with a newborn infant we went home and quickly labeled his thermometer ANAL.  I wrote it on the plastic case, as well as, the cover in big, black ink.  I also put that thermometer in his room, far away from the non anal thermometer that the adults in the house would use.

While supposedly foolproof in taking the temperature, the downside to doing it that way is that you need two people.   Sure, in some cases, some people can do it by themselves, but a new parent trying to take an infant’s temperature anally is a delicate operation fraught with potentially bad options.

As our parenting skills advanced we purchased a digital thermometer for the forehead.  All you needed to do, according to the box is turn the device on and the scan it over someone’s forehead.    Unfortunately when we actually used it the thermometer wasn’t as user friendly as the box had advertised.

Have you seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind?  You know that scene where the UFO lights up a dozen different colors?  This thermometer lit up almost as much as that UFO.  If I had some fishing line I’d string it up and fly it over a sick toddlers crib to chase away probing alien thermometers.

If the thermometer worked then the lights would be an interesting sideshow.   Do you scan it when the screen is blue?  Red?  Oh, you scan it when it’s gray and the arrows make a scanning motion?  Nope, when it’s green and the arrows make a scanning motion.   After all of that our infant was thrashing about like a fish out of water yearning for his temperature to be taken rectally.

“Why are you taking it that way”, somebody asked us when we were describing how high Toddler Mojo’s temperature was during a recent sickness.  In our parental naiveté we thought that it brought us parental or medical street cred to say that his temperature that we had taken anally was 103.  In fact it didn’t bring us street cred and that person simply recommended that we use the back of our palm to see if their head felt warm.

However, my wife and I being too reliant on technology finally discovered the digital thermometer that goes in the ear.  Simply put the little cone over the end of it, place it in the ear, push the button and you‘ve got the temperature.   There are no jars of lubricant, no overly fussy children and no miniature props from a science fiction movie.  I wish that we would’ve started with this one first.